


Zero Hour

by Ylevihs



Series: How Not to Fall [46]
Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén
Genre: Implied Violence, M/M, Spoilers, Vomit, headcanon heavy, mental manipulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:34:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23161021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ylevihs/pseuds/Ylevihs
Summary: Richard goes for a walk
Relationships: Herald/Sidestep (Fallen Hero)
Series: How Not to Fall [46]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1327892
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	Zero Hour

Boris opened the door, sending a sharp, short screech throughout the space. The Mad Dog armor helped hide the flinch. Bo ignored the echo and the bloody, passed out woman tied up in the center of the floor, not a single note of fear from that. Trusting Mad Dog not to do anything too. Tried to ignore Herald too, but his mind kept hitting that pot hole and making his thoughts swerve. How many of the Rangers was Mad Dog working with? Would the Marshal himself be showing up? And to what end? Hadn’t Mad Dog and Herald been mortal enemies—it was how the media had cast them after that big fight at the. Brought his focus back around to Mad Dog, catching the steering wheel and keeping himself from over correcting and pitching up onto the sidewalk.

“There’s a fight going on outside,” he offered blankly. Not afraid per se, Bo had been in plenty of tight spots even before he joined up with Mad Dog. Even before he’d done work with the Wolf Pack. Which. What was it with these villains and they’re canine themes—not the time, something that wasn’t entirely his own thought smacked him gently to bring him back to the moment. He wasn’t afraid, but he knew trouble when it walked up to his face and spit in it. “Lady Argent and someone else. They’re getting closer,” close enough that they either left now or tried to hide it out inside the building. Bo wanted to pack up and haul ass and Richard couldn’t blame him.

Not even a real option. If the regene had tracked them this far, it was because she was following something on, possibly in, Regina. Or the computer.

Something Richard had never felt before, somewhere between the slim ventricles of his heart, slithered thickly into his veins and proceeded to light itself on fire.

“Go get yourself somewhere safe, Bo,” his voice, certainly, but not words he could remember making. Just sounds from his lungs that his tongue flapped at. “I’ll give you a call when we’re finished here,” and to his credit, Boris wasn’t concerned about the money, because his boss always paid in full and usually more than was agreed on in his shakily drawn up contract. But there was still hesitation leaking through. Not just in his thoughts. Visibly in the way his feet shuffled slightly, knees not quite bending to let him bolt out.

“You’re sure?” brain marking over Daniel again in particularly fluorescent highlighter. When there was a beat of silence long enough, Bo accepted that it wasn’t a question his boss was going to answer. He nodded anyway. “See you around,” half nervous. Half relieved. “Be safe,” parting words as he opened the door again with another ear splitting sound and then slammed it shut behind him.

Richard forced himself to wait until he heard the engine kick on. Beside him, still hovering slightly, Daniel looked from the door back to him. With a significantly better understanding of the situation, Danny was nervous, and trying to force it back. He’d been forced to stop before he could get Regina into his arms when Boris had burst in. Letting her slump a bit more awkwardly in the chair and jostling the needle in her neck. Her lungs made a weak noise and Richard could feel Daniel trying not to let it bother him.

“What–,”

“We’re doing this now,” sludgy and thick, coating the back of his throat with something rotted and foul tasting. It felt like his hands were shaking, muscles making miniscule jumps off the deep end. They were steady as he brought them up and grabbed the back of the chair, turning it so he could sit again. 

He hadn’t realized how strongly he’d been forcing it back. But he’d been burying it for years. And only deeper and more vigorously now that he was trying to figure out how the fuck he was supposed to heal. How many feet deep the wall of ice between himself and. Heartbeat pounding in his teeth. In his eyelids. Fingers freezing up in another adrenaline dump, hormone receptors in his brain complaining loudly that they were getting too old for this sort of shit. Muttering by the water cooler that they wished they had been stuck with a normal thirty something, who would just get a bad tattoo and start drinking shitty craft beer to deal with impending doom.

The frenetic dip and flutter of Daniel’s thoughts blustered in against his, wing beats slapping light but by the hundreds. Remembering that when he’d seen Richard go into Mitzi’s body, how disconcerting it was to see him go limp. How unkind he had been with his own body. Would he be safe in her head? What if he found something inside her that hurt him? Should he stay inside to make sure Richard was alright? Go outside to help Angie and try and redirect the fight? What if something did happen inside Regina’s head? How would he even help? Could he even help?

Distantly the Rat King chirped and helped slide a thin curtain between himself and the heat of Daniel’s concern.

Richard had never told Daniel that Argent’s mind could have attacked him on both occasions that he’d gone into her head. But Argent had been awake for those, even if she hadn’t been aware of what to expect. Her thoughts had been up and moving. And could have very easily repelled him, if she’d wanted to. As for when he’d gone into Daniel’s. Well. Daniel could barely control the volume and brightness of his thoughts on a good day when he was being coached through it. If Richard wanted into his head, he didn’t even have to knock.

Regina’s had never even been a consideration for him. Not when he was first born to her and her machines. Not when she’d dragged him back. There was nothing inside her that he had ever wanted. Needed. And even if there had been, the fear was more than enough to put heavy barricades over those paths. But now he needed to consider them. Even if it was only for those few seconds before he dove in. Mitzi had never fought him, her empty mind hadn’t so much as shifted a cobweb in the breeze of his arrival. And Regina was out cold. But who knew how that drug induced sleep would affect the deeper parts of her mind.

“What do you need me to do?” Daniel spoke slowly and carefully. Cautiously. He hated being on unsteady ground and in the past few hours everything had been shaking underfoot. There was a loud crunch from beyond the walls; Richard’s mind unhelpfully slotted it into ‘asphalt breaking’.

“This shouldn’t take me long,” which wasn’t an answer to Daniel’s question. Mainly because he didn’t have one. He shifted on the chair and nearly jerked back in surprise when Daniel’s hand touched his armor again.

“Then I’m not going anywhere,” firm. Resolved. Richard’s mouth filled with the taste of death as he nodded. “I’ll be right here,” tucking his legs up under himself, sitting in the air and trying to.

Oh.

Oh Christ, trying to seem comforting. Reassuring. Hey, babe, I know you’re going into a human being’s head to fuck them up as much as possible without killing them—don’t worry I’ll be here to hold your hand. There was so much wrong with that, Richard didn’t even know where to begin.

So he didn’t.

That realization got shoved to the side to never be dealt with in therapy. Whatever monster it grew into would just have to wait its turn like all the rest of its siblings.

Daniel squeezed gently and the change in pressure registered on the internal monitors of the Mad Dog helmet. There was another crack from outside, followed by the sound of Lady Argent shouting something severe. And then Richard slid out of his head with a stomach dropping burst of nausea and in.

To?

Pitch black, so encompassing and severe that for a brief moment panic stilled his progress. Was she dead? No, no…no, he didn’t think so. He wouldn’t have been able to get inside if she was dead.

It.

Well.

He hoped he wouldn’t be able to.

There were solid forms there, in the darkness. Monoliths of unknown size and proportion. Rising up through the empty void in impossible, twisting geometries. Spires that shifted halfway up into. Something he wouldn’t have been able to name even if he could see them. He could feel them. Knew they were there without being able to register their existence in any other way. A nervous and unwelcome realization. Dread gathered loosely in his lungs; he knew he didn’t want to touch them either. What was being stored in the silent memory banks sent a terrified shiver through him.

There was no reaction from the dark around him. No responding shiver.

Thrums of energy spooled out between them, thin wires and thick cabling running from one to another in knotted webbing. Some were more heavily insulated than others, the dim whine muffled even further. The basic systems of existence. Electrical undercurrents of her brain controlling her heart rate and breathing and digestion. Everything non-essential had been put on standby by the drugs flooding through her. She wasn’t dead. And she wasn’t dying. And there wouldn’t even be the chance for manual override for another hour.

But she was trying.

Somewhere in the distant blackness there was a rumble, low and minor.

Okay. Time to find…Something. Anything. There was vague sensation of mass to his right, within touching distance if he wanted to. No whining hum from it, meaning as best he could guess, it was one of the higher functions of her mind. Which one, though?

He stumbled ahead, reaching forward and trying to still the building terror. She was there, somewhere in the dark with him. Asleep, and trying so desperately hard to wake up and fight him off. No alarms were able to go off; no patrol was coming for him. But her consciousness could feel something wrong and it was searching in the abyss around him.

Contact with the surface in front of him. Smooth and cool, like clean tile. Clean glass, Richard corrected himself. No variations in the surface at all. An even level—an electrical display screen, ready to be tapped at. If the power were to come back on, that is. He allowed his touch to drift, smearing over the surface, feeling and failing to fight back a twisted pleasure at the idea of leaving marks of himself on her mind. Indelible. Unable to be cleaned back to that pristine untouched surface ever again. It was a solid, organic unit, even as he dipped down to feel the base there was no break from the ground. The cables slipping into it were more slender and less protected. No inlet our outlet ports that he could find, but when he wrapped a hand around them firmly. Completely still and silent. Whatever this was, was shut down.

Which meant it wasn’t essential for life, he reasoned. He hoped.

Richard tugged gently. En masse, they clung to the surface. Pulling on an arm. With enough force he might dislocate, with the strength of his suit he could dismember. As it was? Letting the strands slip through until he had just one. And it pulled out with barely any resistance. Like jerking out a single hair. No. He adjusted and gripped two at once. Like pulling stubborn weeds from the cracks in sidewalks.

Like doing community service.

Whatever animal thing was searching for him the dark slipped around him, moving past. Whatever he had severed felt like it was unnoticed. Richard let the chords guide him blindly to another dead unit. A different shape, this one curling as it rose up beyond his head. But still cool. Still flawlessly smooth. Easy to disconnect, ripping free the connective lines. There was a slightly firmer resistance on one or two, but nothing that couldn’t be broken with a sharper jab.

He wished he had something he could cut with, but only briefly. Something inside him was being satisfied by the ragged breaks he was leaving her to deal with. Even if she ever managed to reattach what he was pulling loose, the wounds would never heal cleanly. She would be scarred by him forever.

The third unit was bigger. Flatter and longer, the edges of it sharp against his palms. A shallow depression at the very center, from which a second series of chords spooled loose from. It felt, behind his molars and somewhere at the base of his tongue, very important. Slightly thicker ropes, all still without any thrum of activity. Deadlines. Empty veins.

A sound from the echoing emptiness. The low level blurring that kept her vital organs running was pitching up. Dimly Richard wondered what was going on outside her head. If. No. Don’t think about it. Focus. Whatever happened up there was beyond his control now. He picked up the pace, tearing loose, one by one, each and every chord he could find. Sharp sudden jerks until all that remained was rough and marred.

Gone was the fear of being detected, replaced by something giddy and gruesome, dragging himself forward by her tethers; he was a grim monster dredging itself up from the bottom of the ocean. All sharp teeth grinning, if only for the moments while he was in her mind. The shuffling snuffling creature searching for him was as blind and impotent as Regina’s limp body.

He drove his fist deep into the next monolith he came upon. The lines had been uprooted quick and without as much resistance as a dandelion and it was impulsive and sickeningly easy to slide his hand in, and then his forearm, and begin tearing at the inner workings of the unit. Working blind and by feel alone, it could have been anything, coating him in cool liquid latex thick and wet, motor oil, coagulated blood. Gutting a pumpkin for a jack o lantern carving. Curled his fingers deep and shredded everything he could touch, wanting and unwilling to consider what it was he was destroying.

Perhaps the language center? Pattern recognition. Short term. Long term memory. Impulse control? The ability to regulate her emotions. Fine motor skills. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered, so long as it was broken and she was alive to suffer with it. Richard jerked his hand free, sticky slick and letting it spill onto the floor. If there was a God, whatever was leftover on him would be very dangerous to spread into the other parts of her mind.

He was halfway through gutting the next unit when something in the blackness shifted strongly enough for him to notice. A small tremor, the feeling of a semi-truck driving by too quickly on the freeway and.

And then all at once.

Every alarm built into every system in Regina’s mind began whining. Not a full scream; she wasn’t awake. But it was enough to send the place Richard was standing in sliding sideways. The ground under him gently beginning to angle and dip. Shrill but faint beeping. And something heavier in the dark. He pulled his arm back, bringing with his tightly clenched fist a mass of wriggling…somethings…that he squeeze down on hard until they burst.

He was blinded by the light that struck him back in his own body. Even through the helmet and his crimped shut eyelids, it was piercing and. Would have been nauseating. The nausea was dealt with by his stomach violently purging anything left in it into the helmet’s reserves. Stomach bile and saliva pumped away, courtesy of the good Doctor’s marvelous suit. Everything on his body ached.

Not a great sign.

His suit was still intact. Which meant his body was still in one piece.

Which was a good sign. Not ideal. But as he raised his head gently and pain swam through the back of his head, he found he would take what he could get. His inner ear said he was on his back, but flat and level. On the ground most likely. Somewhere to his figurative north, Daniel’s thoughts were loud and bright. He was hovering high above the floor, defensive and. Richard risked opening his eyes and groaned against the light.

Well. That explained some of it at least. Half the far wall was broken in, large chunks of cinderblock had been flung into the open space. The tarpaulin had been torn slightly and as his eyes followed the trail closer to where he was laying, Regina was still tied to her chair. Granted, the chair was now on its side, leaving her to slump partway onto the floor. Her shoulder was twisted at an ugly angle. Probably dislocated.

Daniel. Danny was lowering himself down quickly at the sound of Richard regaining consciousness.

“Are you okay?” every sound punching into his temples.

Still, easier to clear his throat and offer up, “Yeah. I think so,” than it was to nod. “What happened?”

“The regene punched Angie through the wall,” he said quietly, putting a hand on Richard’s shoulder and helping him sit back up. The world tilted sharply and Richard found his eyes closing out of reflex to make it stop. “I was able to move the two of you away, but I don’t think she even noticed anyone was in here,” Richard didn’t have to look hard to see Daniel replaying the scene of Argent spitting and grinning furiously, shaking her head and charging as soon as she was back on her feet. Caught up in the thrill of the fight.

Good for her.

“Where are the now?” they had to move the computer as well as Regina. More important to move the machine. Whatever damage he’d done to her. He didn’t need to see it. A massive portion of his mind rebelled; maybe he didn’t need to, but by God he wanted to.

“Fighting in the next building,” Daniel nodded to the abandoned apartment block across the street. A small pip of agonized concern. “I didn’t want to risk moving you too far while you were,” he trailed, glance going over to the restrained woman. “What all did you do in there?” not a question that he wanted to ask, but Richard knew that it wasn’t worth either of them fighting it.

“I didn’t kill her,” even from the odd angle, he could see a bubbles of snot and blood at her nose, inflating softly as she breathed in and out. “But beyond that, I’m not sure. All I may have done is make her forget the names of colors,”

“We’ll have to wait and see,” a grim add on. And then his thoughts swooped in a different direction entirely. “Can you get up?” was what he said, however.

Richard’s joints screamed at him as he moved, but he could in fact move. “I can,” neither of them really acknowledging that he still reached for, and received, Daniel’s hand to steady himself as he stood. He stomped hard on the rising bitterness in his stomach. “I don’t want to–,”

“I know you don’t,” Danny cut him off. “Do you have a better option?”

He didn’t. And the fact that he didn’t stung. “I guess we move her to HQ,”

“I’ll take her,” relief flooding his voice that Richard wasn’t going to fight him on it. And then tacking on, “I know this didn’t go the way you wanted it to, Richie,” the ‘but’ was coming, and Richard couldn’t stand to hear what it was going to be. There was no way he could handle being told Daniel was proud of how he’d handled it.

“I’ll be okay,” he cut him off. “And I’ll see you there,” sensation was starting to flood back in every direction. “Be safe, lover boy,”


End file.
